What the screaming fuck.

[ishyface]

From apiphile:

Women should say yes, yes, yes more.

Arndt said while giving women the right to say "no" to sex was an undisputed success of the women's movement, "the female libido tends to be a fragile, easily distracted thing that gets buffeted by normal life and a couple can't afford to have their intimacy reliant on that fragility".

...

Arndt said low-libido partners, which are mostly women, needed to put sex on the "to-do list", even if they didn't feel like doing it.

"The notion that women have to want sex to enjoy it has been a really misguided idea that has caused havoc in relationships over the last 40 years."

With the right approach from a loving partner, if women were willing to be receptive "and allow themselves to relax … they would enjoy it", she said.

Forget about mutual respect and consent, the key to a happy sexual relationship is one person lying back and thinking of England while the other jackhammers away whispering "just relax, baby, you'll love it, I promise." Kinda hoped we'd got past that idea!

Look. If you're with someone and they don't want to have sex with you? YOU DON'T GET TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM. Because their body is theirs, and they do not have to let anyone touch them ever, and having sex you don't want to have, even if you do "relax" (which I assume is code for "stop fighting and give in, you frigid bitch"), will fuck you up but good. Your partner does not belong to you! Consent is important! So if they say no, you fucking stop. I don't give a shit how damaged your poor delicate ego is, YOU FUCKING STOP.

And if you don't... well. There's a word for that and it's spelled r-a-p-e.

Comments

[elorie.livejournal.com]

I read the part about the fragility of the female libido to my sweetie and he said, "I don't know what world they live in." *snicker*

[ishyface.livejournal.com]

I'm usually tempted to conclude that people who make sweeping generalities about women's sexuality have never met any, but the fact that Arndt is a woman makes me think that maybe she actually thinks this kind of behaviour from a partner is okay, which kind of makes me feel sorry for her.

Not sorry enough to make me stop hoping she falls in a puddle or something, but sorry.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

It's a case about making correct observations about what is happening, but drawing the wrong conclusions about it. I notice that most of her examples are people in their 50's and 60's. That means they were all raised when the gender-role expectations about how Men Want It and Women Don't were in full swing. Even the youngest of them can remember when birth control became easily available, and despite the so-called "sexual revolution" that followed, it takes a lot more than a pill to really change culture.

I bet that the men in those relationships are probably unwittingly giving out mixed signals...that is, they may say they want their wives to want sex, but what they really want is for their wives to say yes when they want sex...an important distinction. The guy who said he'd wait for his wife to ask for sex had the right idea, but probably after thirty years of a different pattern, and then there's the question of his wife being raised to believe that Nice Girls Don't.

Just to play devil's advocate here, the author is a therapist, and her job is to help people improve their relationships. If there's no sex happening, and that's making one partner really unhappy, then that's a pretty easy and obvious thing to address...and this is crucial...within the time frame that insurance will pay for counseling. I think it's kind of lazy and not best practice, but there's more to it than her just being an idiot. I do think that approach is likely to foster more problems in the long run, both in the relationship and in the sense that it reinforces cultural bullshit, but...and here I get really nasty and cynical...that's not really her problem. Less cynically, changing cultural expectations and what not is not really within a therapist's scope. She has to deal with what she's got to work with.

[ishyface.livejournal.com]

I notice that most of her examples are people in their 50's and 60's. That means they were all raised when the gender-role expectations about how Men Want It and Women Don't were in full swing. Even the youngest of them can remember when birth control became easily available, and despite the so-called "sexual revolution" that followed, it takes a lot more than a pill to really change culture.

*nod* Good point.

I do think that approach is likely to foster more problems in the long run, both in the relationship and in the sense that it reinforces cultural bullshit, but...and here I get really nasty and cynical...that's not really her problem.

But if her approach fosters more problems in a relationship she is trying to help fix doesn't that make it her problem by definition? She can't do much about cultural bullshit on her own, but she CAN help reinforcing that cultural bullshit in this particular case, not to mention encouraging one half of a partnership to do something that basically throws their right to bodily integrity out the window. I know you're playing devil's advocate, but it kind of baffles me that she wouldn't make that connection.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

It will cause more long term problems, but is likely to make them (or at least one of them) feel like things are improving temporarily. And, since typically it's the women who want to go to counseling and men who are reluctant, there's more mileage in improving things from the male's POV.

All of this has to do with how insurance companies pay for counseling, which is typically only 8-12 WEEKS. There's not a lot you can do in that amount of time that's deep or long-lasting.